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Change Models That Work At The State Level
As decision makers in states across the nation enact legislation, appropriate resources and reengineer systems to enable learners to thoughtfully and intelligently use technology as a learning tool, attention should be given to:
- Balancing state leadership with regional and local decision making to ensure realistic, intelligent approaches to infrastructure, planning, information sharing, curriculum designs for learning, professional development, human resource deployment, change management and funding;
- Looking beyond the education community to challenge diverse groups of stakeholders to use their collective will to design and invest in community-based approaches to educational reform;
- Recognizing that "dollars follow vision" and building the capacity of school districts and local communities to intelligently design and implement learning technology blueprints which ready their communities for economic and educational success;
- Ensuring that technology and telecommunications are core building blocks in the redesign of the state's educational system;
- Designing the infrastructure (the boxes and wires) as a critical 21st-century "means" to the real "end" of aligning teaching and learning to a knowledge-based society;
- Building on a three-prong approach to funding based on the state's responsibility to provide equity of educational opportunity, the community's responsibility to invest in services for local citizens, and the district's responsibility to reprioritize existing funds toward improved student learning; and
- Taking a thoughtful, "go slow" approach to change, focusing on highly successful solutions to focused challenges and incorporating into the process sustainability and incremental change, growth and dynamic, ongoing reviews.
Significant change can happen from within the current system. A basic premise of this approach is that "you can't mandate the really important things." Change must happen from within a system, at the community level, but the state and region must build the capacity of those communities to succeed.
Experts suggests a model of change in which there are four major arenas for implementing public policy, a fifth factor of benchmarking has been added to the model:
In considering enactment of state law and appropriation of funding for education technology, the following approaches should be given consideration:
Through the enticement of incentives, policy makers can guide the implementation of public policy. In the area of learning technologies, it is often accomplished by placing requirements on the funding provided to school districts for technology. For example, requiring that the district submit an approved plan which meets basic criteria in order to receive state funds, or requiring a local match based on the relative wealth of the district.
The intent of capacity-building is to ensure wise investment of state resources at the local level by developing the capacity of the local school district to make intelligent, informed decisions. States are accomplishing this by promoting public awareness, developing community-based technology planning models, establishing demonstration sites, providing comprehensive classroom models so new designs can be experienced, etc. This model strongly supports the concepts of local flexibility and local decision-making while assuring that state policy-makers that state resources are being invested wisely.
System changing refers to the need to view things systemically and adjust the system to take full advantage of learning technologies. For example, many states are in the process of revising/adjusting their academic standards to reflect the influence of technology and telecommunications on what students are required to know and be able to do. The next step will be a re-alignment of the assessment systems to reflect these new standards. Another example is the revision of educator (teacher and administrator) certification and licensure standards to reflect new teaching and learning practices using technology and telecommunications.
Mandates are often necessary in order to ensure equity of access by all students. Most states are finding that a mandates without appropriate capacity building, system changing and incentives are not effective.
Benchmarking is necessary if the reengineering of the school is to be sustained. The gains by students in technology-enriched classrooms are broader than the current instruments measure. An important next step will be for decision makers to carefully define what technological fluency within the academic standards looks like, and what evidence they will expect which demonstrates that students are reaching those benchmarks. Over 35 states have defined technological fluency, redefined their academic standards to reflect the potential of technology, yet none have developed assessments which measure student performance in this arena.
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